4 ms·

I've worked at 3 startups that did this.

• tptacek 14y ago
  How did it work? Was there a formal meeting? Did it annoy people? How did the company respond once they had the list? What kind of outreach did they do? Did you get bonused for those people?
  • rdouble 14y ago
    It was free form. There wasn't much to it other than on staff recruiter got the names of your bros and then harassed them with email. It annoyed people, but only as much as any other non engineering thing annoyed people. We were supposed to get bonuses but I don't think anyone did except the founder's girlfriend. We didn't actually get many people hired this way, so at least everyone was on the right track of only trying to hire those smarter than yourself.
    • tptacek 14y ago
      Ok, so that's not really "going after them with crazy intensity"; it's punting the problem off to your employees. Have you ever seen this strategy done well?
      • rdouble 14y ago
        It wasn't entirely pushing the burden on the employees. Each place had an ops guy or on-staff recruiter who just got the names from us and took it from there. I've not seen it done effectively first hand, but I've heard it's the way to go.
  • clicks 14y ago
    > How did it work? Was there a formal meeting? Did it annoy people? Stripe making its workers write out a list of all the engineers they know seems a bit extreme -- I mean, generally you can just name the top 5 smartest people you know of without much thinking. That's how the company I worked for went about this. Interestingly, it made us talk to our friends, and let them know the company was looking for workers and to expect to hear from them soon, because 'I referred you to them'.